Sunday, October 7, 2012

Redistribution - Monty Perlin

Author: Tom Lester People seem to go ape with an announcement of anything free. They will often stand in line for hours to get some bobble-head or trinket. This malady seems to affect most of us and, I admit, free airline miles are my weakness, the means of visiting children and grandchildren too…

People seem to go ape with an announcement of anything free. They will often stand in line for hours to get some bobble-head or trinket. This malady seems to affect most of us and, I admit, free airline miles are my weakness, the means of visiting children and grandchildren too distant away. Of course, the undeniable truth is that the bobble-head, trinket and even the airline free trip are never free. Hidden in that freebie is the cost of a successful retail marketing strategy for the goods or services that seems to make most of us lose self-control. Which transitions to another subject.

How would you react if a thief entered your home and demanded half of everything you owned? Angry? And what if one of your local policemen were there with you and the thief, and the officer sustained the thief’s demand? Outraged? And what if this happened to your more prosperous neighbor? Would you still have that same anger and infuriation as when it was happening to you? Although the comparison may not be ideal, the bobble-head, the trinket, the airline trip or your personal assets are the result of someone’s industry and awarded to another. While the objects and ticket are the forces of a free market system at work, the confiscation of your assets is the implementation of the state’s police power. Unremarkably, it happens daily and most pronouncedly every April.

I’m not lame-brained enough to think that taxes should be eliminated. And I won’t produce a list of services to which the government should restrict itself in using our taxes. Invariably someone would want to argue that my list was too long or too short. But the point is that state confiscation, taxing ability and collection, is merely a means of redistribution of wealth from one party to another.

Somewhere in our political lexicon there must be a wordlist of terms and expressions that should never be used, with simple acceptable alternatives. During the 2008 campaign, I vividly remember hearing Barack Obama’s taped comments about the Constitution’s silence on the redistribution of wealth and thinking the media would surely pursue his thoughts on the subject. Nothing, even though I suspected “redistribution” was certainly a verboten word. Now fourteen years later Barack Obama’s 1998 taped expression of his belief in redistribution is finally in the news.

American economist and author Thomas Sowell wrote an article entitled “The Fallacy of Redistribution” that accurately addresses the problems with redistribution.